It is well established that gesture facilitates learning, but understanding the best way to harness gesture and "how" gesture helps learners are still open questions. Here, we consider one of the properties that may make gesture a powerful teaching tool: its temporal alignment with spoken language. Previous work shows that the…

Instructional interactions that occur between teachers and students around foundational mathematics topics are critical for supporting mathematical proficiency among students with mathematics learning disabilities (MLD). This study investigated whether the initial mathematics skill of 880 kindergarten students at risk for MLD predicted the…

Objectives: The importance of breastfeeding exposure and children's development of self-regulation, independently, are well established. Each of these domains also has been linked to better cognitive development and academic achievement in children. However, little is known about how breastfeeding affects development of early self-regulation…

This study investigated the relative importance of three subdomains of early number competence (number, number relations, and number operations) in predicting later mathematics achievement in cross-sequential samples of pre-K, kindergarten (K), and first graders (N=150 at each grade). OLS-regression analyses showed that each subdomain predicted…

Preschool improves children's kindergarten readiness, but the cognitive outcomes of preschool enrollees and nonenrollees tend to converge partially or fully in elementary school. In older programs, most of this convergence occurs in kindergarten (Li et al., 2016), but evidence from today's programs is sparse. Using data on 4,971 children who…

We investigated the effect of writing interventions on written composition for students in primary grades (K-G3) with a focus on whether effects vary as a function of different dimensions of composition outcomes (i.e., quality, productivity, fluency, and other), instructional focus (e.g., transcription, self-regulation strategies such as…

We examined the relations of inference, vocabulary, decoding, short-term memory, and attentional control to reading comprehension and mathematics performance for first-grade students in the US (N = 83). The students were composed of 75% Hispanics, 15% Whites, and 6% Asian Americans. Students' performance on mathematics and reading comprehension…

Several mental health programs have been developed in clinics and transported into schools, which has great potential for increasing access to intervention for students who may not be otherwise served. However, such programs may lack consideration of the complexity and constraints of schools, including the diversity of student needs and…

A socioeconomic status- (SES-) related achievement gap in mathematics emerges prior to school entry, and increases as children move through elementary school. This gap makes implementation of demanding mathematics standards (e.g., the Common Core State Standards) an ongoing challenge. Early educational intervention is a strategy for addressing…

Introduction: Schools have become a primary setting for providing mental health care to youths in the U.S. School-based interventions have proliferated, but their effects on mental health and academic outcomes remain understudied. In this study we will implement and evaluate the effects of a flexible multidiagnostic treatment called Modular…

The present study examined whether teacher-child closeness and conflict across kindergarten and first grade varied by gender and disruptive behavior at kindergarten entry within a sample of 324 predominantly Black children from low-income, urban households. Three main findings emerged from the analyses. First, contrary to findings from previous…

We investigated the dimensionality and relations between L1 (a speaker's first language) and L2 (a speaker's second language) writing skills in narrative and informational genres and higher order cognitive skills--inference, perspective taking, and comprehension monitoring--for Spanish-English dual language learners in primary grades. Dimensions…

Within the context of the Direct and Indirect Effects Model of Writing (Kim & Park, 2019), we examined a dynamic relations hypothesis, which contends that the relations of component skills, including reading comprehension, to written composition vary as a function of dimensions of written composition. Specifically, we investigated (a) whether…

Chinese children routinely outperform American peers in standardized tests of mathematics knowledge. To examine mediators of this effect, 95 Chinese and US 5-year-olds completed a test of overall symbolic arithmetic, an IQ subtest, and three tests each of symbolic and non-symbolic numerical magnitude knowledge (magnitude comparison, approximate…

This project tested the effects of adding instruction of trios of children in patterning, mathematics, early literacy, or social studies to ongoing instruction in kindergartens. Children were randomly assigned to trios which were randomly assigned to one of four kinds of instruction. A quarter of the trios received patterning instruction with a…